Page 106 of Lessons for Marquesses
Why did he want to walk with her? To simply walk, without speaking? She didn’t care about ruin,mostly, but was she destroying her reputation on a march resembling a military offensive?
He parted the thorny hedgerow with his body alone, cutting through it like a powerful river sluicing through a vale. Hekept walking. She merited no consideration. He expected her to trample through hawthorn.
She stopped while his strides lengthened, heel to toe, and avoided a fox hole effortlessly.
“Bugger.” She searched for a place where there weren’t thorns amidst the frothy white blossoms, settled for parting it with her forearm, and thrashed through the hedge. She came out the other side with her shirt in ribbons. Opening the tear at her middle, she peered at her bare skin. There was a distinct breeze near her backside.
“Quite chivalrous of you!” she shouted.
Mr. Wolf continued on his forced march across the buried moat and headed straight for the tower. “Where is Anthony Philips when you need him?”
“Back at the picnic, enjoying himself!”
“Not as much as before I arrived.”
“Not as much asI wasbefore you arrived!” Georgiana stuffed her fists at her sides. “And why do you care?”
He turned to face her, still walking, and jabbed a thumb at his glowering face. “Does it look like I care?”
“Most definitely.” He presented his back, and his strides lengthened. “You miss me, remember? Likely because you have no one to crush beneath your very large boots!”
He tossed over his shoulder, “You know what they say about the size of a man’s feet.”
She ran at him, and she was fast by all accounts but he had widened the distance during her fight with the hedgerow. It was impossible to shove his back and smother his face in the dirt.
He disappeared around the corner of the main hall. She rounded the decayed expanse and met stony silence. She twisted to a movement at her right. Mr. Wolf stood inches from her, buttressed against the entrance to the tower, a boot planted on a pile of rubble.
Here. There.Nothing in between. The in-between was being swept weightlessly in his arms and aimed for the tower stairwell. He pressed her there, against the stone with moss and water trickling at her back, as cool as his gaze was hot.
His hands cupped her shoulders, adjusting their hold as if she might flee. Her breath emptied and swooped into her lungs in the quietdrip, dripof water on ancient stone.
Raw defeat etched his voice. “I didn’t lie when I said this was not what I wanted. That it would never happen again. It was most sincerely my wish.”
He clasped her jaw between his fingers and thumb, stroking her cheek, sending her into a painful, delirious pleasure, a place between ecstasy and desperation.
He released her suddenly. His body loomed over her in the shadows, his gaze fulsome. “This scar on my face did not come from a pirate. I wasn’t aboard a ship. It was a Frenchman. I was at war. I fought in the colonial wilderness for five long years. I killed so many men, and those I did not pick off with my musket, those who would not meet me in battle, I chased them down.”
Suddenly she understood what his nightmares entailed.
“I want to tell you how I earned the name, the Wolf.”
She reached for him. He drew away and paced toward a beam of sunlight shooting through a parapet to the carpet of wildflowers. His boots crushed the delicate blooms.
“I had been shot in the arm. I tracked the soldier down—it might not have been the right one, but I didn’t care. I gutted him. And his innards slipped out and he cried for his mother. And then I howled to the fucking sky with his hair clenched in my hand.”
Georgiana struggled for words. What could she say that he did not already know? Trite it was, to lend her opinions on which he was an expert.
But she sensed he wanted her to say something.
“Did you wish to be a soldier?” she asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, I believe it does.” She pressed a hand to her chest, where it had cracked open inside at his confession. “Although I suppose those who wish to go to war are shocked just the same. To kill men. To see men killed. I can imagine it. Like a vast, methodical slaughter.”
His left hand clenched and unclenched with relentless obsession as he paced.
“You were forced, weren’t you?”
